The Province of Munster might be called properly "the Land of Ruined Castles," for they are more numerous here than on the banks of the Rhine. You are scarcely ever out of sight of a crumbling tower or a useless gigantic wall wearing a mantle of ivy. Nearly all of these ruins are attributed to Cromwell and his army, who have no defenders, and the religious historians and local guides tell us that they were destroyed by that man of mighty prejudices and purposes in order to plant Protestantism upon the ruins of the papal power in Ireland. Cromwell was undoubtedly guilty of atrocious cruelty and devastation at the cost of thousands of innocent lives and hundreds of millions of property, but he could not have destroyed all these castles and monasteries if he had remained in Ireland ten times as long as he did, because many of them were in ruins when he arrived and many were not built until after his departure. Torna, the Druid, prophesied that a wind from the southeast would fell the tree that covered Ireland. And that was always a vulnerable shore. Agricola planned to cross with his legions from the Cornish coast and add Eire, as this country was then known, to the Roman Empire. The southeastern corner, the counties of Wexford and Waterford, with their harbors open and undefended, were the gates through which many foreign invaders came and brought death and devastation with them. The harbor of Waterford was called the Haven of the Sun until the Danes came, but was afterward known as the Valley of Lamentation, because of the mourning that followed the battles that were fought there. And even the invaders did not do so much damage as domestic strife. The kings and the clans, the Desmonds and the Geraldines, the O'Briens and the O'Donoghues, the MacCarthys, the O'Connors, the O'Sullivans, and other local chiefs who occupied the southern third of Ireland, were always attacking each other, besieging the castles of their rivals and often leaving them as we see them now--green wrecks and grassy mounds. And they spared not the monasteries that were built near all the homes of the great. This was a form of munificence as well as piety which prevailed also in Italy and France in the Middle Ages, where every robber baron kept a small army of friars and monks to do his praying, just as he kept squadrons of knights to do his fighting. Hence you will invariably find in southern Ireland the ruins of an abbey or a monastery beside the ruins of a castle, and most of them are the result of duels and feuds between the native chieftains and their clans, although many were left in flames and gore by the forces of William of Orange, Henry VIII., and Queen Elizabeth, as well as Cromwell. [Illustration: THE RIVER FRONT AT WATERFORD]